


you've gone too far (I can't look at the stars)

by Cones_McMurphy



Category: Numb3rs (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Introspection, Larry Goes To Space, Megan misses Larry, Mentions of canon trauma, Mentions of canon violence, No Dialogue, Processing Trauma, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, and also just cause it fits them, bad mental health, episode tag to 3x12: Nine Wives, idk what this is, mentions of Crystal Hoyle, title from Stars by Grace Potter and the Nocturnals, to enhance the emotional experience of this fic, which I recommend listening to btw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-18 06:14:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29113605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cones_McMurphy/pseuds/Cones_McMurphy
Summary: Megan was used to emotionally taxing cases.
Relationships: Larry Fleinhardt/Megan Reeves
Comments: 6
Kudos: 6





	you've gone too far (I can't look at the stars)

**Author's Note:**

> Me, in the year of our lord 2021: writes numb3rs fanfiction that maybe two other people will read

Megan was used to emotionally taxing cases. 

Everyone on the team--in the whole FBI, really--was. Trauma was an occupational hazard, it seemed. Though, as a profiler, she found that some cases hit her harder than they did her colleagues. It was her job to get inside a killer’s head, and that was a dark and terrible place to be. She tried her best to compartmentalize it, and she was probably better at ignoring her emotions than was strictly healthy. As a psychologist, she knew it was more productive to let herself feel things, to be open with her sadness and her anger. But as an agent, she knew that she didn’t always have the time to process her emotions before the next big case hit. So, she took it day by day, and if some nights her dreams were full of monsters, and some mornings her body felt as weary as it would’ve if she hadn’t slept at all, if the world felt cruel and lonely most of the time, well. That was just the cost of protecting others. 

This case was harder than most, though. Most cases didn’t involve dozens of young girls, forced into marriages with grown men. Most days didn’t end with a house full of people blowing up. Strangely, despite everything that had happened that week, the hardest part for Megan was talking to Josephine Kirtland. Most cases, getting in the head of the killer was the worst part of it. But then, she didn’t usually have to talk to scared, traumatized teenagers, constantly asking after their kidnapped mothers. 

Megan groaned, the look in Josephine's eyes when she asked if her mother was in the house burned into her brain. She pushed herself off her bed, where she had been laying down, staring at the ceiling, and pulled her aching and exhausted body into the shower. The hot water soothed her muscles, but unfortunately not her mind. This was her usual routine. She would stay in the shower until the water ran cold, and then fall asleep watching sitcom reruns, attempting to drown out the day with bad jokes and worse laugh tracks. 

Recently, however, she’d taken up a new coping mechanism on hard days--of which there had been a surplus since Crystal Hoyle. It involved a certain physicist, maybe dinner, and a drive in a vintage car, out to the middle of nowhere to star gaze. Larry liked his structured complexity, but even a man as eccentric as Lawrence Fleinhardt understood exceptions to his rules. He was not the most emotionally intuitive man in the world, often not realizing exactly why she insisted on breaking the rules until all of the sudden he did, but that was more than okay. He didn’t need to read her mind. He simply needed to offer his voice, steady and rambling, and his arms, gentle but secure. He would hold her and talk for hours, about space and the stars and the wonder of the cosmos, and it didn’t matter if she only understood half of what he said, because she felt safe.

_ And then the bastard had gone to outer space.  _

Megan leaned her head against the shower wall, wishing for a moment that Charlie hadn’t called in his stupid NSA favors. If he hadn’t, Larry would still be here on Earth, and she wouldn’t feel so alone. She didn’t mean it. Of course not. It was his dream. She wanted him to live his dreams. And he would be back in a few months. But how many hard days would she have to get through without him until then? How much death and despair? How many reminders of her own kidnapping would she have to face alone? 

Her stomach churned, and she wondered briefly when she’d eaten last.  _ Definitely not dinner--Lunch? Shit, breakfast. _ She didn’t feel particularly hungry, but she had enough rationality left to know she needed to eat. She turned off the water, now cold, and stepped out of the shower. After drying and dressing (sweatpants and a pilfered CalSci t-shirt), she made her way to the kitchen where she pulled a Lean Cuisine out of the freezer and popped it into the microwave. She glared at it as it cooked, as if this lackluster frozen dinner was the cause for her current misery, instead of merely a symptom. 

When it was done, she took it to her bed, and turned on the TV. She flicked through channels before landing on a rerun of  _ The Golden Girls _ . She let it play as background noise to her meal, which was some kind of chicken and pasta dish--she hadn’t bothered to look at the box before throwing it in the microwave. She’d made enough of these to know how long it took to cook without looking. It was decent, a little heavy on the marinara and low on the chicken, but decent. 

It reminded her of a dinner she’d had with Larry, a few weeks before he left. A small italian restaurant, chicken parm and white wine. He’d regaled her with stories of the Apollo missions, and she’d listened happily, letting his words wash out her work day, replacing murders with meteoroids, as he often did. She would give anything to be back in that moment, instead of the moment she was actually in, alone in her apartment eating a frozen dinner. 

“Fuck!” She said out loud to herself, feeling every bit pathetic and pining. Was she really so miserable without him? Could she not even attempt to keep living her life, with or without him? She’d gotten along just fine before she met him, hadn’t she? 

Well. No. And that was the core of her problem. 

Sure, she was  _ fine _ before, but she wasn’t  _ really _ living before she met him, she was simply surviving, the world around her bleak and uncaring. And then he crashed into her life, a comet crashing to Earth, lighting up the sky. He saw the world as so full, so beautiful, so endlessly fascinating, and when he spoke about it, she started to see it that way, too. He brought her to life, in a way, filled her days with starlight and laughter, and he took it all with him. 

Megan swallowed the last of her dinner, and set the plastic tray onto her bedside table. She glanced at the TV, where her sitcom had turned into an infomercial, and picked up the remote. She channel-surfed for a few minutes, but nothing really got her attention. Instead, she found her eyes gravitating toward the large telescope positioned in front of her window. She couldn’t call Larry--at least, not without a lot of NASA planning--but she could look up at him. He’d helped her align it properly before he left, so she didn’t even have to do anything. She left the TV on, the background noise still a small comfort, and stepped over to the scope. 

The International Space Station looked so small from her telescope. A rectangle with wings. In reality she knew it was bigger than a football field, but if she’d learned anything from Larry it was that reality was subjective. And in her deeply subjective reality the International Space Station was just a small box in space where her boyfriend-who-won’t-admit-to-being-her-boyfriend was for the time being, instead of the small box that was her apartment, where she wished he was. 

She wondered if he missed her, or if the thrill of being in space was enough to deter his thoughts. She hoped he was happy up there, of course she did. She hoped it was all he’d dreamed of and more. But she also hoped he spared a few moments to look down on her, the way she looked up at him. 


End file.
